The Magus

The astonishing appeal of Paulo Coelho.

Coelho has sold nearly a hundred million books. Photograph by Joachim Ladefoged.Credit VII

Paulo Coelho wrote “The Alchemist” in two weeks, in 1987. It is a story, told in “A Thousand and One Nights” and in Rumi’s “Masnavi” and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges—the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read—of a man who dreams that he must leave home to find a treasure and, upon arriving at his destination, discovers that the treasure is in fact buried in his native land. In Coelho’s telling, the protagonist is an Andalusian shepherd boy (Coelho says that he is that shepherd boy) who, bedding down with his flock in an abandoned church, dreams of finding a fortune at the Pyramids, in Egypt. He sells his flock and buys a ticket to Tangier, and in the desert meets an alchemist, from whom he learns that “wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.” When the boy reaches the Pyramids and starts digging, a band of thieves attacks him, even as he explains that he’s searching for gold revealed to him in a dream. The thieves leave the boy for dead, and their leader, as a final insult, tells him that he, too, has had a recurring dream about buried treasure—his is in an abandoned church in Spain—but is not so stupid as to have believed it. The boy is overjoyed and returns to the church, where he unearths a chest of gold coins. “The Alchemist” has been translated into sixty-four languages and has sold more than twenty million copies. A movie version, which is expected to go into production next year, will star Laurence Fishburne, who wrote the script and who will also direct, as the alchemist.

Coelho’s books include eight novels, two memoirs, several collections of occasional writing, a volume of quotations, and “Warrior of the Light: A Manual,” a book of platitudes. They have sold nearly a hundred million copies. Bellboys, waitresses, and policemen recognize his face; in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton was photographed carrying a copy of “The Alchemist.” In his writings, Coelho, who is Catholic—though he says he does not “kiss the hand of the Pope, that’s for sure”—presents himself as a searcher and a sage, a hybrid of Carlos Castaneda and Kahlil Gibran. His cosmology, which includes angels and devils, signs, omens, and, for each person, a destiny called his Personal Legend, promises that whatever is sought—love, money, inspiration—can be readily attained. Quotidian events, like weather and coincidence, he sees as miraculous. Many of his books begin with a prayer to Mary and an epigraph from the Gospel according to Luke. “Eleven Minutes,” a novel, published in 2003, about a Brazilian prostitute in Geneva, is an exception in that it also has a “hymn to Isis” found at Nag Hammadi. Santiago Pozo, the owner of a Hollywood marketing firm who is working on an adaptation of “The Valkyries,” Coe-lho’s memoir of spending forty days in the Mojave Desert, and who describes himself as a “recovering Catholic,” says, “The beauty of his writing is his ability to talk to Catholics and Christians but also open the door to a new understanding of divinity.” His special talent seems to be his ability to speak to everyone at once. The kind of spirituality he espouses is open to all comers. Its tenets are sayings like “All things are one”; “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”; and “The extraordinary is always found in the way of common people.” He is a lenient teacher—“It is not a sin to be happy,” he writes—and an empathetic one. In the memoirs, and in the introductions to his novels, he emphasizes his own flaws and failures, forgives himself for them, and, by extension, forgives his readers theirs.

Coelho’s plots tend to be allegorical, and his readers often say that they see their own lives in his books. His characters, though nominally diverse—a suicidal Slovene in a mental hospital who falls in love (“Veronika Decides to Die”), an orphaned barmaid in a European mountain town whose morals are tested when a stranger comes to town (“The Devil and Miss Prym”)—are somehow indeterminate, their nationalities adjectives without great cultural consequence, their struggles universalized. The writing is unadorned and pleasant to read. “It’s like music, really, the way that he writes, it’s so beautiful,” the actress Julia Roberts said in a 2001 television documentary about Coelho. Coelho writes in Portuguese; some literary critics in Brazil joke among themselves that translation must improve his prose. “He writes in a non-literary style, with a message that confirms common sense,” Manuel da Costa Pinto, a columnist for Folha de S. Paulo, said. “He gives his readers a recipe for happiness.”

Mário Maestri, a history professor at the University of Passo Fundo and one of the few Brazilian critics who does not reflexively dismiss Coelho, has written, “In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho’s narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centered, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another one that will be different but absolutely the same.” Maestri calls the work “yuppie esoteric narrative.” As if to prove the point, this winter Starbucks distributed five million Venti cups printed with a Coelho quote: “Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure. Never forget your Personal Legend. Never forget your dreams. . . .”

Coelho is almost sixty. His name, which has been given to a suite at the Hotel Ambasciatori in Rome and to a hot-chocolate drink at Le Bristol hotel in Paris, is pronounced Co-el-you. He is solid and short, with the capable, roughened look of someone who makes his living out-of-doors, and he dresses in black cowboy boots, black jeans, and black T-shirts. In the evening, he adds a black cashmere jacket with a bit of red thread affixed to the lapel, which indicates that he is a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. His hair is white and shaved short, except for a little ponytail that sprouts from the back of his head. On his left forearm is a crude tattoo of a blue butterfly, which he and his wife—Christina Oiticica, a painter, who designed it and has a matching one—got in 1980, as a “wedding ring.” Christina, he says, is his last wife (he has had three others). He is superstitious—won’t allow a dinner table of thirteen—and, in any other context, avoids using the word “last,” which he finds morbid. His watch is new. He got it several weeks ago from the International Watch Company, which commissioned him to write seven short stories, one about each model the company produces. He took his fee in the form of a donation to the Paulo Coelho Institute, a foundation that helps children who live in the Pavão-Pavão-zinho favela, in Rio. The assignment took a week.

One night in March, Coelho was in Paris, where he has an apartment in a 1925 building in the seizième, which he bought three years ago. The apartment is furnished sparely but lusciously, as if a person with rococo tastes were half finished moving in: white leather couches, pillows with rose-in-bloom motifs, orange silk drapes, an antiqued mirror. In a vaisselier in the dining room sit a few lonely bottles of fine liqueur. Coelho and Christina have no children; their twenty-five-year-old niece, Paula, who works as their assistant, lives with them. Coelho also owns a converted mill in the French Pyrenees and an apartment on Copacabana Beach, in Rio. He spends a few months of the year in each place, and the rest of his time in transit. In the morning, he was leaving on a weeklong trip to Italy to promote his most recent novel, “The Witch of Portobello,” while Christina and Paula spent a few days in the South of France. (The book will be published in the United States this month.)

Coelho sat at a glass-topped desk, going through e-mails on his computer, in an office where the shelves were mostly empty, except for a few books about Iraq and a thumbed deck of saints’ cards, with St. Dismas, the patron saint of thieves, on top. On a Web site that leaves ample space for comments and conversation, Coelho maintains an unusually warm relationship with his readers. The site functions as a New Age chat room, where readers exchange ideas about prayer (“I am a muslim, but I am not practicing it! . . . I trust in god, but with globalisation it’s hard to be stuck to religious principles!”) and the spiritual path (“Has anyone seen ‘The Secret’?”).

Two weeks earlier, Coelho had been reading a page on the site devoted to “daily miracles,” and had been moved to post an announcement of his own, inviting the first ten readers who responded to join him for a party in Spain on March 19th in celebration of the Feast of St. Joseph. “We are warriors who believe in dreams, miracles, omens,” he wrote, explaining why he wanted to meet them. Later, he said, “The next day, I had a hundred requests. I had requests from Japan, I had requests from Catalonia, I had requests from South America, I had requests from North America, I had requests from Europe. They’ll be very intimidated. They’ll be very shy. People wait for six hours for me to sign a book.” He felt guilty about the readers coming from so far away—they would have to pay for their own transportation and hotel, and would get only a few hours in his company—but was determined to honor his pledge.

The illusion readers have that Coelho is talking directly to and about them is enhanced by the fact that he has often borrowed from their lives for his fiction. The central character in “The Witch of Portobello” is a Romanian Gypsy woman, adopted as a child by Lebanese Christians and living in London, who discovers supernatural powers through dance. Athena, as the character names herself, was inspired by an encounter Coelho had with a Romanian flight attendant who went to a talk he gave in Vienna several years ago. She dined with him afterward, and later travelled with him through Romania. The prostitute in “Eleven Minutes” also has a reader counterpart: she attended a signing of Coelho’s in Geneva, and took him to the Rue de Berne, in the city’s red-light district. He drew from her experiences, as well as from those of another prostitute, who specialized in S & M, to write the book.

Sitting down in the living room and lighting a cigarette, Coelho mentioned another encounter that had yielded a novel. “In 2002, Christina and I had already money, as you can imagine. But we thought we should try to live only with the basics—a few clothes, a laptop for me. We moved to a two-star hotel in the Pyrenees. Christina Lamb came to interview me there.” Lamb, a reporter for the London Sunday Times, went to see Coelho in August, 2003. She had just returned from Iraq, and during the interview, and in a few subsequent e-mails, she told him anecdotes from the field. A year later, she got an e-mail from Coelho that contained a first draft of “The Zahir,” a novel about a man who goes on a journey of self-discovery after his war-correspondent wife leaves him for parts unknown, along with a note saying that he had modelled the female character on her. “I was surprised and slightly taken aback, since we hadn’t met since that first time in France,” Lamb told me. The press speculated about the identity of his muse—an Italian actress, a Russian fashion designer, a Chilean former beauty queen—until a Portuguese newspaper outed Lamb.

“Later, I bought the moulin, the water mill,” Coelho said. “But for two years we decided to live in this two-star hotel. It was a magical time.” Paula and Christina came into the room, accompanied by a friend of Coelho’s, a shaman visiting from the Amazon. “Sit down, sit down!” Coelho ordered. They sat. The shaman wore an eye-shaped amulet on a leather thong around his neck. He had come for the St. Joseph’s party, and had brought a supply of ayahuasca from the rain forest. Coelho gave up drugs twenty-five years ago, but he encouraged everyone else to try.

“What is this?” Coelho said, suddenly noticing on the coffee table a D.H.L. package addressed to him. “Let me put a good vibration on it.” His eyes open and glazed, he muttered something and touched his chin with his index finger. “South Africa,” he said finally, cutting the package apart with a knife. Inside were ten copies of “The Alchemist,” translated into Xhosa, and a request that he inscribe copies for Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki, Desmond Tutu, and several others. He opened another package, which contained the script for a Brazilian soap opera, “Eternal Magic,” in which he’d agreed to play the reincarnation of the Celtic god Dagda. “Actor!” the shaman said, with a broad smile, and Coelho blushed.

Coelho said that in Milan, the first stop in Italy, he would meet a reader from a remote hamlet in northern Sweden—“the Swedish,” he called her—with whom he had been corresponding for several weeks. “One month ago, I go to my public mailbox,” he said. “There was a mail that was titled ‘minus 33 degrees, alone, and sick,’ so I said, ‘What a title! Let me read this e-mail.’ I discovered she’s a lady. She’s thirty-one years old. She has a sickness that nobody can cure, something in the lungs. She asked if she could meet me. I said, ‘Why not? I’m going to Italy, bring your exams, because I have a network of friends.’ She can die at any moment. She’s meeting us tomorrow. We’re going to take her to Rome.”

“Oh là là,” Christina said.

“She is not a stranger,” he said. “She knows my books, she knows my soul.”

Dinner was served at a long table strewn with white rose petals and decorated with crystal candlesticks and butterfly napkin rings. Coelho started talking about his mill. “My village has two hundred people,” he said. “Now an omnibus goes by and says, ‘This is the house of Paulo Coelho.’ One day there comes a girl—a woman, a woman!—from Ireland.”

“Oh, wonderful, Ireland,” the shaman said.

“She walked right onto my terrace, where I am sitting in the sun, and said, ‘I came all the way here from Ireland because a satellite told me I should come here and commit suicide in front of you.’ She was carrying a rucksack. I thought about John Lennon. She could pick up a gun and shoot me. I said, ‘O.K., let’s have a suicide, but first let’s have a coffee.’ Then she sat down and I stood up.” He stood up, to demonstrate. “Now I could control her. I go inside and come back with coffee. I said, ‘Listen. I have a way you can die without any pain. I’m a magician. You read “The Pilgrimage” ’ ”—Coelho’s first book, published in Brazil in 1987, a memoir of walking seven hundred kilometres on El Camino, the ancient route of Catholic pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, in northwestern Spain. “‘The Road to Santiago is fifty kilometres from here. Leave this house, walk—it’ll take you three days—walk the road, and in three months, when you’re finished, take the bus back here and I will teach you how to die without any pain.’ I became the satellite; I started guiding her. I said, ‘You have my blessing, so here is my phone number. Call me when you’re ready.’ She called me. She said, ‘I changed my mind.’ She never came back.”

“What did you feel?” the shaman asked.

“Fear. And then I put in a gate.” He circled his finger around the top of his wineglass and said to Christina, “Do you remember her, in shorts, very good-looking?” Christina nodded.

A little time passed, and the shaman said, “Ugly women are bad luck.”

Coelho was born in 1947, in Rio. His father was an engineer, and wanted him to be one, too; his mother was a devout Catholic, and Coelho was sent to a Jesuit school. He hoped to be a writer, and as a teen-ager started hanging out all day at the beach with a troublemaking crowd, the poet among toughs. His parents, believing he had gone crazy, sent him to a mental institution, where, in the course of three stays (he ran away twice), he was given electroshock therapy. In “Confessions of a Pilgrim,” a book-length interview with the Spanish journalist Juan Arias, conducted in 1998, Coelho says that he recently discovered the medical report from his admission to the hospital. “I was surprised by the banality of the motivations. In the medical report, it says I was irritable, I harassed people politically, I was doing steadily worse in school, my mother thought I had sexual problems, I hadn’t matured sufficiently for my age and when I wanted something I tried to get it by every possible means, which revealed increasingly radical and extremist attitudes.” In the late sixties, he drifted away from his family, became a hippie, did lots of drugs, and started a short-lived underground magazine called 2001, which covered subjects like extraterrestrials and Jung. Researching a story, he came across the writings of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and then joined the Alternative Society, a sect that advocated drugs and practiced black magic, and sought to embody Crowley’s principle “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” He met a record producer and singer called Raul Seixas and began writing songs for him. He also initiated Seixas into the Alternative Society and introduced him to drugs.

In a few months, Seixas was a star, Coelho was rich, and together they were setting aside money to form a Brazilian version of the utopia that Crowley had established in Cefalù in the nineteen-twenties. “I wrote ‘Gitâ,’ and all of a sudden the whole of Brazil was singing it,” Coelho said. “It was about the moment in the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ when Arjuna asks Krishna, ‘Who are you?’ ” Roberto Menescal, a well-known bossa-nova musician, who, while working in A. & R. at Polygram, produced Coelho and Seixas’s collaborations, remembers that they dressed in combat boots and military garb, kept their hair long, and always wore dark glasses. When their rock-and-roll anthem “Sociedade Alternativa” came out and kids all over Brazil were singing it—“Do what you want / because it’s the whole / of the law, of the law /. . . Long live the Alternative Society / Long live the Alternative Society / The number 666 is Aleister Crowley”—the military dictatorship in Brazil decided it was subversive and arrested Coelho. He was released, and immediately kidnapped by paramilitaries, who accused him of being a guerrilla fighter; they held him for a week and, Coelho told Arias, tortured him by applying shocks to his genitals. After that, Coelho gave up religion for several years.

“I don’t regret my experience with black magic, and, of course, it gives me a kind of aura—it’s good for my biog-raphy,” Coelho told me. But the only book he has ever destroyed was one about his two years in the sect. Christina asked him not to publish it. “‘This is going to cause you a lot of damage,’ she said. ‘I got a sign from the Virgin.’ I deleted it from the computer and I threw the hard copy away in a waste bin in Rio de Janeiro. I don’t like burning, because of the energy.”

Coelho held various jobs in the music industry, wrote television bio-pics and soap operas, and travelled. In 1982, he and Christina went to Europe. They bought a Mercedes for a thousand dollars from the Indian Embassy in Yugoslavia, and drove it to Germany. They went to Dachau, and Coelho, terrified by what he saw there, had a vision of a man standing before him. Two months later, in Amsterdam, he saw what he took to be the same person, and approached him. This man, a Jewish businessman whom Coelho refers to in his writing as “J.” and “my Master,” inducted him into something he calls the Order of R.A.M. (Regnus Agnus Mundi), a society for the study of symbols. R.A.M. is surpassingly obscure—discounting the allusions Coelho makes to it—and has a curiously ungrammatical Latin name, though he says that it is part of the Catholic Church, and that it is more than five hundred years old. (Efforts to verify its existence proved futile.) Not long after the encounter in Amsterdam, Coelho met J. in Norway, where, in a ritual beside three Viking ships, J. gave him a snake-shaped silver ring, which he wears to this day, on the fourth finger of his left hand.

Meeting J. marked Coelho’s return to Catholicism, but not to the Jesuit variety of his youth—rather, to a syncretic, self-invented form, with plenty of room for hocus-pocus. “The Valkyries” contains a glimpse, from Christina’s perspective, of life with an aspiring magician: “There were rituals, exercises, practices. There were long trips with J., with no defined date of return. There were long meetings with strange women, and men who had an aura of sensuality about them.”

“The Pilgrimage” begins with a delightfully outlandish scene of a ceremony on a mountaintop in Brazil in which Coelho, accompanied by his master, his wife, and a “representative of the great fraternity that is comprised of esoteric orders from all over the world—the fraternity known as ‘the Tradition’ ”—is about to be made a magus. He describes how he buried his old sword—“a great help to me during hundreds of magical operations”—and the Master placed a new one on the ground. “All of us spread our arms wide, and the Master, invoking his power, created a strange light that surrounded us.” The Master pronounces Coelho, by the power and love of R.A.M., a Master and Knight of the Order, but when Coelho tries to take the sword his Master crushes his hand with his foot. By reaching for the sword, instead of refusing it and waiting for it to be given to him, he has shown that his heart is impure. The Master tasks him with walking the Road to Santiago; on the road, he says, Coelho will find his sword.

Along the way, a guide, Petrus, appears, and teaches Coelho R.A.M. exercises that will sharpen his intuition, conjure his personal devil, and inspire agape, or “the love that consumes.” In the final pages of the book, Coelho discovers what he calls the “secret of my sword,” and first entertains the notion of fulfilling his childhood ambition to be a writer. Last year, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his walk, he retraced his route by car. “On the second stop I said, ‘Why don’t I meet my readers?’ I decided I’m going to do signings.” He stopped in little towns all over northern Spain, and then kept going. “I travelled for three months, from southwestern France to Vladivostok to the World Cup. I called the signings a blitz. I didn’t plan them. I was Easy Rider.”

In Milan, Coelho met the Swedish—she had travelled seven hours to the airport in Stockholm to get a flight to Milan—and took her to his hotel. She was very tall and very thin, with blond hair down to her ribs. “Relax. Relax!” he told her, as he arranged with the concierge for a room for her in a nearby place she could afford.

That evening, Coelho had a cigarette outside the hotel. He was pensive; the Swedish seemed unwell—she spoke of constant fevers and severe bouts of pneumonia, but didn’t seem motivated to discover their cause. He worried that it had been a mistake to invite her. “Some people don’t want to be helped,” he said resignedly. Then his mood changed abruptly. “I have a crazy idea. I think I’ll do a signing here in Italy!” He anticipated the reaction of Elisabetta Sgarbi, his Italian publisher. “She will be hysterical,” he said, gleefully. “I like to challenge her.” A young woman from the publisher’s press office arrived with a chauffeured car to take Coelho to be photographed with some local dignitaries at City Hall, before a dinner at the apartment of Letizia Moratti, the mayor of Milan, which had been organized by Sgarbi’s brother, the city’s culture minister. “What I’m thinking is that tomorrow I’ll post on my blog that I’m here in Milan and I want to meet my readers,” he said after he got in the car. The press officer eyed him nervously.

There was a risk that, on such short notice, only a few people would show up—a potential embarrassment for the publishing house. But Coelho has usually had the opposite problem. In 1998, in Zagreb, three or four thousand people came to get his autograph; one man brandished a gun and threatened to use it if he was denied. When Coelho went to Tehran, in 2000, several hundred people met his plane in the middle of the night. Arash Hejazi, the editor of Caravan Books, Coelho’s official Iranian publisher—he has at least twenty-seven unauthorized publishers—says that Coelho was the first non-Muslim writer to promote his work in that country since the revolution. He compares his reception to the one given Iran’s national soccer team when it came back from winning the game against Australia that took the team to the World Cup. Five thousand people turned out for the signing, in one of the city’s largest bookstores, and Coelho had to leave after only three or four books, because of the danger of a stampede. “Everything got out of control,” Hejazi wrote in an e-mail. “When people saw Paulo, they rushed toward him, the bookstore was almost destroyed, and a woman fainted from the pressure.” Coelho is also very popular in the Arab world. Karim Khayat, who publishes Coelho in North Africa and the Middle East, says “his style of writing translates beautifully into Arabic.”

The car pulled up to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a grand nineteenth-century shopping arcade beside City Hall, and Coelho got out. He had spotted a Rizzoli bookstore. “I think I’ll do the signing here,” he said. “Let’s go in and see it.” He walked briskly inside and asked to see the manager on duty. “Perfetto,” he said, when the stunned manager agreed to the event, two nights hence. “Where are my books? If I don’t see my books, I’m not going to do a signing. You always have to check.” The manager led him to a prominent display. Coelho picked up the Italian edition of “The Pilgrimage” and opened it to a random page. “‘Have you ever been in love?’ ” he read aloud, pointing to the line and looking around significantly.

Later, walking to the Mayor’s apartment, he passed two women on the street. “Did you hear them?” he said. “They were saying, ‘It’s him, it’s him.’ Yeah, it is. I am going to invite them.” He backtracked to the corner where they were standing, and tried to tell them about the event at Rizzoli. They looked confounded but pleased, and a translator stepped in to clarify. Coelho had already moved on. By the end of the night, it was decided: the Swedish would not be coming along to Rome.

The night after the signing in Milan, there was another one in Rome. It was a warm, springlike Friday evening, and Coelho was concerned about attendance. He braced himself for disappointment, but, in spite of his anxiety, instructed a publicist to get him two large felt-tip pens, in black, for signing. He gives the pens away, like guitar picks, when they run dry.

The bookstore was long and narrow, hugging a curve in the Via Veneto. It was filled with hundreds of people, and more spilled out onto the street. When Coelho arrived, exactly on time, the crowd, holding up cameras, cell phones, and video cameras, applauded. “Patience, eh?” he said to laughter. As he made his way to the back of the room, where a desk had been set up, people called out, “Paulo, Paulo, Paulo!” Those outside knocked on the windows to try to make him look their way. There were white-haired ladies, men in business suits, women in cargo pants, parents with young teen-agers. “Maestro,” they called him, one after the next. Coelho looked each reader in the eye, shook hands, signed his name in an exuberant swoop across the title page, and posed for a photograph. Many people brought more than one book; several brought photographs of themselves with him at past signings. An American girl—she looked to be on her junior year abroad—said breathlessly, “It’s my goal to read every one of your books in a different language. So far I’ve read ‘The Alchemist’ in English, ‘El Zahir’ en español, and I’m working on ‘Veronika’ in Italian.”

Coelho grew red with the heat, but was clearly enjoying himself. After an hour or so, a man in his mid-twenties came forward and showed Coelho his left triceps, where he had tattooed a phrase in Portuguese from one of his books: “Everything that had to happen did, and nothing happened.” Another youth, his friend, stepped forward, and pulled up his shirtsleeve to show that he had the same tattoo. “This is a miracle, no?” Coelho said, hugging the second man, who was crying softly. “May God bless you.” The two remained outside the window, staring at Coelho and taking pictures, for a long time.

The desk was soon covered with devotional objects: a bunch of freesia, a bottle of red wine, a lotus candle from a young woman who instructed Coelho, “I used it one time, now you use it one time.” (In Milan there had been manuscripts, a worn copy of the “I Ching,” an origami crane.) A Bulgarian man with a shaved head said, “Thank you for writing ‘The Alchemist.’ The level of messages is on the level of the Bible.”

With about fifty people left in line, Coelho stood up and went among them. “I’m going to sign all the books. Stay calm. Now I’m going to move toward you,” he said, and disappeared into their embrace.

Whenever Coelho travels, even by car, he says a prayer that he will meet interesting people—“people who will protect me, help me in my work.” On the runway in Rome, before the flight to Pamplona, the airport nearest Puente la Reina, where the St. Joseph’s party would be held, he said, “The most famous witch of El Camino, Jesús Jato, is coming from Villafranca del Bierzo, six hundred kilometres away.” Jato has a shelter on the road, where pilgrims can spend the night for free. “He arrived today. He is the classic witch, sorcerer, call it what you will.” The plane began to move, and from underneath his black T-shirt Coelho took out a chain heavy with medallions: St. Joseph, St. Teresa, St. George, St. Michael. (“The Warriors of Light, as I see all these angels who fight,” he said. “I hate crosses. I hate sacrifice.”) He clutched the medallions in his right fist and brought the fist to his mouth. He pointed his index finger out the window at the sky. His eyes took on the glazed look; his lip trembled with an interior monologue.

Over the Pyrenees, near Lourdes, Coelho looked out the window. “There is a mountain without any snow on it that is sacred to me from my second pilgrimage, the Road to Rome,” he said. “The Road to Rome is about the feminine side. The Road to Santiago is masculine—it’s about logic, discipline. For the Road to Rome you spend seventy days in a place—any place—and I chose here. That was in ’89. At the beginning, the pilgrimage seems like such a stupid idea. After you get used to it, you get attached. When I reached Compostela, at the end of the Road to Santiago, I thought, What am I going to do with my life? That’s when I made the decision to burn all my bridges and become a writer.”

When Coelho landed in Pamplona, Christina and Paula were waiting for him. He drove toward Puente la Reina, where pilgrims’ routes from all over Europe converge. In “The Pilgrimage” he describes walking into the town and seeing “a statue of a pilgrim in medieval garb: three-cornered hat, cape, scallop shells, and in his hand a shepherd’s crook with a gourd—a memorial to the epic journey, now almost forgotten, that Petrus and I were reliving.” Driving, he got lost, and used the car’s built-in G.P.S.

The next afternoon, at a small hotel where many of the party guests were staying, the proprietor greeted Coelho. “Your books are very good for me and for my business,” he said. “As Hemingway was for San Fermín, you are for the pilgrimage!” (The running of the bulls in Pamplona takes place during the Feast of San Fermín.) “This comparison with Hemingway, I’m very glad to hear it,” Coelho said. Earlier, he had remarked, “When I did the pilgrimage, they had four hundred pilgrims a year. Now they have four hundred a day.”

By the night of the party, held at an elegant hotel called El Peregrino, the ten readers invited by Coelho had all arrived. There was Marie, an Air Force veteran and now a civilian contractor on the U.S. base in Qatar; Chieko, who, travelling alone for the first time at the age of thirty, had taken a twenty-hour flight from Osaka; and Alex, a thirty-one-year-old woman from Staffordshire. “I probably needed to go to counselling, but I read his books instead,” Alex said. She credited Coelho with her successful tutu-making business. “He gave me the courage to believe in myself. I would never have had the confidence. He says, ‘Miracles happen,’ and they do.”

Coelho had slept all day in preparation, and he was in a joyous mood. He sat at a table, with large candelabra, receiving people and presents, and signing books. Outside, snow came down in thick wet flakes. “Look at the snow,” he said. “Only a magician could make this snow.”

A hearty paella was served at ten, and afterward Jesús Jato, the witch, went to the front of the room and began making preparations over an ancient rusty cast-iron tripod cauldron. Beside him were a pound of sugar, a cup of coffee beans, a Granny Smith, and a flagon of fifty-five-proof grappa. He was making a queimada: a punch that he would set on fire, while saying prayers for the assembled and a spell to ward off bad spirits. Jato had few teeth, broad hands, and bushy gray eyebrows, and wore jeans and a lumberjack shirt.

Coelho dinged his glass. “Now begins the classic ritual of the queimada,” he said. “Jesús is one of the emblematic figures of the Road to Santiago. We are going to gather round, and he is going to make a kind of exorcism. The only thing you have to do is say ‘Ooooooo!’ ” Just then, a cell phone rang in Jato’s pocket, and he answered it. “He’s a new kind of witch,” Coelho said.

Jato lit the pot and raised an Ooooooo! from the guests. He poured the sugar in, and the smell of burning filled the room. “For the people who didn’t lose their way but found a new way!” he said.

Ooooooo! the guests said, throwing their arms in the air.

He added a fistful of coffee beans. “For the pilgrims who said they walked forty kilometres and it’s not true!”

Ooooooo!

He skinned the apple, and the coil slipped in. “For the pilgrims who have blisters!”

Ooooooo!

“For the witches!”

Ooooooo!

“For the pilgrim Paulo Coelho!”

Ooooooo!

Coelho said, “For all the pilgrims that are friends of Paulo Coelho!”

Ooooooo!

Jato raised the flame-engulfed ladle and let the stream of alcohol, shimmery, almost silver, fall into the kettle. He passed the flaming ladle around. Coelho dipped his index finger into the center, held it up, glowing, for a moment, and popped it in his mouth. ♦

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.